Did we lose our way in making efficient software? • Hacker News Board

Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#161

Post by werdnapk » Sun, Apr 28, 2024, 10:16 PM UTC

oellegaard wrote: post #13

We recently moved an old page from plain html and everything generates by the backend to react and we had a drop down take several seconds to open with a thousand or so items in it. Was like 100ms to open the entire page before. It was suggested to only display the first 100 items and let the user type in 3 characters until it started rendering. Unfortunately this is the reality for many these days. Of course instead…

So use a server side rending framework such as Turbo. I've tried so many client side frameworks (what the kids tend to demand these days) and they're all slow with lots of data... except for Turbo.

Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#162

Post by Veserv » Sun, Apr 28, 2024, 10:17 PM UTC

injuly wrote: post #54

rini17 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't use Qt?

Qt licensing is its own mess. For commercial software, the pricing is 350-500$ per developer, per month. Seriously [1]. The company that now owns the framework doesn't seem to acknowledge the gap between big enterprises and solo developers/smaller teams. [1] Yes, one can use Qt for commercial software without buying a license (as long as it is dynamically linked), but their marketing does everything it can to hide th…

That is 4,200-6,000 $/yr. In the US, a junior developer in a software company costs (all-inclusive, not just salary) around 150,000-200,000 $/yr. That is 2-4% of yearly cost on tooling. That is not very much.

It might not be worth the price, but that is hardly ridiculous. It is quite believable to get a 4% productivity improvement from appropriate tooling. You need to do a cost-benefit analysis to determine the answer to that question.

Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#163

Post by nocman » Sun, Apr 28, 2024, 10:18 PM UTC

eternityforest wrote: post #140

We did lose the way, and then we found it again. Not everything has caught up yet but a lot has. Moore's law kept going, and software started getting a little bit faster, which was enough to stop undoing the gains made by hardware, and now things are back to mostly snappy. Occasionally you'll get a 30mb file that's slow... but subjectively things sure seem better than 10 years ago when you couldn't even think about o…

> and now things are back to mostly snappy.

This is the inverse of my experience. There are few applications that have a UI that I would refer to as 'snappy'. In fact, I am trying to come up with a single example, and atm I can't even think of one.

Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#164

Post by mihaaly » Sun, Apr 28, 2024, 10:19 PM UTC

BobbyTables2 wrote: post #2

In the early 90s, I believe MS Word came on a few floppy disks and the main executable was 2MB. It ran fine on a 16Mhz 386 with a total of 2MB RAM (let that sink in!) It did pretty much everything it does now, only lacked a grammar checker. (WordPerfect had one.) Now we measure things in GB units. 1000X bigger, but what was gained? We not only lost the way, we don’t even know the destination any more.

Basically what we had in Word 6 is what I use today in the newest Words.

It only takes longer to use while finding what I want among the bloated set of other things added.

Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#165

Post by egypturnash » Sun, Apr 28, 2024, 10:20 PM UTC

“My father told me he wanted Microsoft Word on his laptop. So I told him to use Google Docs instead. When that turned out to suck, I installed Libre Office instead.”

Why didn’t you just, like, get him Word? Why did you make him try to use a shitty web app that assumes everyone’s computer is brand new, then install an open-source program that’s going to be constantly playing catch-up with Word’s updates and may cause problems down the line when Dad wants to work with someone else’s Word docs?

Maybe there was a perfectly good reason for this choice. I can think of a few. Maybe you helped Dad enter The Year Of Linux On The Desktop recently. Maybe Dad didn’t want to pay for Office. Who knows. Whatever the reason, you didn’t put it in this post. And you ended it with a plug for your completely unrelated SAAS, too.

Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#166

Post by Rochus » Sun, Apr 28, 2024, 10:21 PM UTC

hn_version_0023 wrote: post #148

Rochus wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The alternative that exists today that I can buy and all the apps I need for work will actually exist and function correctly is called…

> all the apps I need for work

The whole thing is like an intentional vicious circle. People buy the systems because certain applications are available on them (or rather because that's what everyone does), and the application manufacturers support the systems where the most customers are expected. But if one takes an impartial look at which applications or functions are really needed for a company, there are certainly alternatives.

Unfortunately, the open source community sabotages itself, e.g. by constantly changing the ABI of essential functions and thus undermining the portability of non-open source applications (see e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32471624).

Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#167

Post by can16358p » Sun, Apr 28, 2024, 10:21 PM UTC

I think convenience is the keyword. Users (not us HN crowd, the rest of the world) don't want to struggle with installing software, most of them don't know the difference between Internet, Browser, or "app".

They just open up "internet" and work on docs, and for 99% of the cases Google Docs works fine despite running in a browser that is much less efficient than a native "app". For most cases it's more than enough for the regular user who is used to "computers being slow" anyway.

Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#168

Post by titzer » Sun, Apr 28, 2024, 10:23 PM UTC

mike_hearn wrote: post #111

vnuge wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It was the path of least resistance, so we took it. Well said. I believe many of the "hard" issues in software were not "solved" but worked around. IMO containers are a perfect example. Polyglot application distribution was not solved, it was bypassed with container engines. There are tools to work AROUND this issue, I ship build scrips that install compilers and tools on user's machines if they want but that can't…

It's very platform specific. MacOS has had "containers" since switching to NeXTStep with OS X in 2001. An .app bundle is essentially a container from the software distribution PoV. Windows was late to the party but they have it now with the MSIX system. It's really only Linux where you have to ship a complete copy of the OS (sans kernel) to even reliably boot up a web server. A lot of that is due to coordination prob…

> A lot of that is due to coordination problems.

The dumpster fire at the bottom of that is libc and the C ABI. Practically everything is built around the assumption that software will be distributed as source code and configured and recompiled on the target machine because ABI compatibility and laying out the filesystem so that .so's could even be found in the right spot was too hard.

Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#169

Post by jwells89 » Sun, Apr 28, 2024, 10:23 PM UTC

constantcrying wrote: post #159

impossiblefork wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we really though? Web developers do of course, but I've hardly touched web development myself. Web interfaces etc., are a choice, but I think it's driven by commercial needs-- a desire for subscription revenue instead of one-time sales, etc. Much of the modern cloud-based or half-online world is quite unnatural from a user perspective, and where there is no need for monetisation-- for example with OpenOffice, the…

Certainly there has been almost no pushback. I don't think most users really care for native applications, what they like to see is clicking on something and having it work instantly, web apps deliver that.

I think an overwhelming majority of users aren’t technical enough or well enough versed in UI/UX to be able to put a finger on the frustrations they experience with software, and this is something that’s important to remember when considering complaints coming from a more technically-inclined minority — even if only a small number of techy folks are unhappy, these frustrations likely exist in the larger userbase too even if most users are unable to articulate them. In addition, some percentage undoubtedly perceive these issues but are just too busy to bother with sending in feedback.

With all that considered, I believe the extent of pushback that is possible is quite limited as long as the app technically works, but this is far from an accurate indicator of user happiness.

Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#170

Post by LAC-Tech » Sun, Apr 28, 2024, 10:28 PM UTC

hn_version_0023 wrote: post #148

Rochus wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The alternative that exists today that I can buy and all the apps I need for work will actually exist and function correctly is called…

I run desktop linux and I've had no issue with joining zoom or teams calls.